Temporal
by Alice the Strange
Summary: Sometimes Sherlock Holmes feels like something from another time.


~ temporal ~

* * *

"_It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think of as our present existence as naught but a dream." _―Edgar Allan Poe

* * *

Sherlock is somewhere in London, on some unfamiliar upper-class street that he knows by map rather than by sight. At present he's engrossed in an intriguing newspaper article, because he often reads as he's walking along, relying on his peripheral vision to keep him from tripping over or bumping into things. Then there's a voice, a woman's voice. It comes out of nowhere and breaks into his concentration, scattering his thoughts like so many leaves.

"I _know _you," she says.

Sherlock hears the words themselves, of course – there's not much he doesn't hear, which is sometimes useful and very often frustrating – but he doesn't pinpoint them as being directed at him, because the voice isn't familiar and not even he can pay attention to every throwaway scrap of conversation. But then the woman, or the girl, or whoever it is, speaks again, and this time he can hear that she's speaking to him, because it's always the tone, it's always in the tone, and he looks up, impatience and curiosity warring for dominance. Her last words echo and he hears them again, like a stuck record.

He looks up, and for a moment (less than that, a fraction of a moment, one grain of sand from an hourglass), it's 1890, and the woman standing before him is familiar; more than familiar, and instead of chewing-gum-speckled pavement there's suddenly cobblestones and the air smells of filth and smoke, of salted market food and dank river-water. Then in the blink of an eye, the vision is lost. The woman is once again alien to him, but not an enigma, never that.

"Sorry, I don't think we've met," he says coolly, looking her up and down. Designer skirt and shoes, nice jacket, hair expensively cut and styled; she obviously has money put by, and from what he can glean, there aren't too many skeletons in her closet, either. She's in a long-term relationship, trying to give up smoking, owns a Persian cat. Sherlock's never seen her before in her life.

She shakes her head, words tangling amongst themselves like brambles, already losing the thread of what she was saying. "Met – no, no, we haven't, not exactly. You see – " Her finely plucked eyebrows draw together, as if recognising some fallacy in her own speech, and she comes to a halt. It's a warm afternoon in early August, and the trees – boxed in by their neat iron railings – cast a cool green shadow over the two of them, sunlight and the flickering shadows of leaves.

Sherlock returns to his article, beginning to walk once more. "You've mistaken me for somebody else," he informs her, without looking up.

"I haven't! There's a photograph." She's blushing now, but continues stoically, determined to finish what she's started. "In my family album. You're in it. Or maybe it was a relative – yes, that must be it. A relative." Her high heels tip-tap on the ground as she hurries after him.

Sherlock shrugs. "I very much doubt it. None of my relatives particularly resemble me, nor do I see any reason for them to be featured in a stranger's photograph. What's your surname?"

"Morstan," she says, looking more doubtful than ever. "It _is _you, I'm certain of it. But – but it _can't_ be. I mean, it's an old photograph, so – oh, I don't know…" She trails off.

All his life, Sherlock has been mistaken for someone else. He has been approached by people he's never met, told that their grandmother or grandfather knows him, or that his name is somewhere in their files and records, claims which can never be proven or disproven. It seems unlikely; his appearance is not a generic one, but he's grown used to it after a time. "It won't be me," he tells her flatly. "I'd go and check again, if I were you," and with that he quickens his walk, turns a corner, leaves her behind.

* * *

Now and again, Sherlock sees people, fallen horribly out of time and place, all strange and wrong, like fractured bones. His brother, once, in a top hat and tails, reflected briefly in a shop window. John he sees all the time, always from the back, always ahead of him in the street. Walking away. He could be mistaken, of course, but he doesn't think so. It's the gait, the stance, the slight limp, the set of the shoulders. He always loses John in the fast-flowing London crowd, blinks and then one or both of them is gone. It gets so that he's accustomed to it. Sometimes he'll find himself searching for them in mirrors and reflections, in puddles after a storm has passed.

Then he shakes himself out of it, and continues on his way, trying to forget; and it is, as always, all the same.

* * *

The next slip happens at a crime scene. Sherlock hears the door of the old house bang against the wall as Lestrade enters, and he glances up, mouth half-open and ready to explain his findings, then stops dead in his tracks.

_I've seen you before, _he thinks. It's a ridiculous thing to think, ridiculous and thoroughly nonsensical, because after all, this is _Lestrade; _he's known him for years, sees him every week if he's lucky and there are enough interesting cases on to keep him occupied. But no, wrong, wrong, this is something else, this is different. He has the strange impression that he has seen this man before, but long, long ago; that he isn't just the stocky DI with salt-and-pepper hair, who manages to keep Sherlock in check when few others can and stop him from being locked away when sense and the law dictates that it would be the more sensible option, who let Sherlock sleep on his sofa when his father had frozen his bank accounts and the withdrawal was reaching its old nauseating, bone-crushing worst. Instead, the man is something long-gone and forgotten, something from another place, another time.

Once, he haunted London, but now London is haunting him, footsteps in the dark and the clack clack clack of a phantom stagecoach, girls with dark smiles in filthy corsets, pickpockets not yet ten, cockney thugs in bowler hats, knives up their sleeves and gloves of tattered leather on their hands. He closes his eyes and he opens them and they're still there, more than shadows, less than ghosts, their bodies solid and hot and real, and they see him and he sees them, and sometimes when he looks down those aren't his clothes, except they are, and he still can't remember whether the earth goes around the sun or not, but what has that ever mattered to him anyway?

"Sherlock?" Lestrade says, and he becomes aware that he's fallen still, staring at nothing, poised to speak and yet voiceless, mute. How odd he must look. He blinks, once, twice, and like the tide going out, the strangeness draws away from him and leaves awareness in its place. The man in the doorway is just Lestrade again, and he's Sherlock Holmes, and the clack clack clack of wagon wheels is only the tick of an antique clock hanging on the wall. The memory of his previous deductions floods back to him, and light with relief, he rises to his feet and begins to explain.

The hollow unease lingers on for a long while afterwards, a dark well of discontent. He ignores it, locks it away in the attic of his mind, and tells himself it's mere fabrication, nothing more.

* * *

"Do you ever feel like you were someone else?" Sherlock asks.

John doesn't respond for a moment. Then his fingers still on the keys of his laptop and he glances up, forehead knitted in confusion. "What?"

"Before you were _you, _I mean." He struggles to clarify. "As though there was something else before all of this. Have you ever felt that?"

John thinks about it for a second. "You mean, like reincarnation?" he asks finally.

"Sort of like that, yes."

Closing the laptop, John studies his friend's expression, seemingly trying to work out which direction he's coming from on this. "Why do you ask? It's not like you to wonder about that sort of thing."

"I wasn't," Sherlock says, a little stiffly. "I was asking you what _you _thought about it. Do try and listen when I speak, John."

"Well, are you talking about déjà vu? 'Cause there's a scientific explanation for that, they've just found out. It's actually caused by – "

"I'm not _talking_ about déjà vu!" Sherlock's voice is heated. For some reason, it seems crucial that John understands this, that John does not think him mad, that he has some kind of explanation for the weirdness that has been creeping, slowly and insidiously, into the cracks of Sherlock's life. There's nobody else who he'd dare to voice this to. There's nobody else who would listen.

"When it comes down to it," John says, after a pause that's just long enough to let Sherlock know that he doesn't appreciate being snapped at, but short enough to mean that he's not seriously offended, "I don't think there's not much point fussing about it. I mean, it's kind of like the solar system – "

"Can you shut up about the solar system? I've already told you – "

" – in that it's not all that important, apart from hypothetically," John ploughs on. "It might be appealing to think about, but it's not affecting you, or your work, is it?"

Sherlock can't think of an answer to that, so he just stares out of the window. There is nothing appealing about this, nothing appealing about a red bus one moment and the clatter of horse-drawn hansom cabs the next, the street sign is grey with dirt and the red bricks are soot-stained, and he looks up, and up, and the 8:00am sky is the colour of sour milk, of melting vanilla ice-cream, the moon a cold, far-off silver coin, and then down to his boots that are still muddy and to the trickling blood of a horse for which nothing waits but a shotgun if it's lucky and a knife if it's not and his hands are too steady, chemical-burnt and the fingernails ragged, this is wrong and he knows it, but it doesn't feel wrong, not the smoke in the air or the woollen gloves on his hands or the shadows that he's standing in, darker than he's used to, except for how they aren't, and –

"Sherlock? You OK?" John's voice is concerned. Sherlock shouldn't like that.

He kind of does, though.

"Fine," he replies, meaning something else, but not saying it, and he wrenches his gaze from the window, stares around the flat like someone waking from a dream. The images are bedazzled, greenish, imprinted afterimages of some blinding light, shadows already fading as daylight catches up with them. _You caught some small death while you were sleepwalking…_

"Food for thought, isn't it?" John opens up the laptop again, then stops. "Talking of food, do we have any of that pate left? I was going to make a salad, but it wasn't where I left it. Have you moved it or something?"

"The pate died," Sherlock answers absently, his mind on other things. "Don't worry – I cleaned up the mess. Won't happen again. Probably."

John sighs. "I'm not even going to ask," he mutters, turning back to his laptop. Just before he begins to type anew, he glances up once more. "Sherlock?" he says, quietly. "Don't start…don't start worrying about any of this, all right?"

Sherlock stares at him.

"That kind of stuff," John says, "it just messes with your head."

"Yes," Sherlock says, distantly. "I imagine that it does." His gaze slips past the window again and down to the street below, and a girl in ragged crinoline stands beneath a gas lamp in the early morning smog, waves.


End file.
